Please Enjoy Your Happiness (28 page)

For one enchanting second I feel that if I extended my hand I could take the hand of the other Paul you knew, the seaman, sailing from Hong Kong to Yokosuka with nothing more on his mind than how he will say goodbye. He has only a child’s comprehension of that moment and how it will impact each stage of development throughout his life. He has only very limited understanding of what has happened during that summer. Watching the waves, he pictures your face and he smiles because he is happy. He is not wrestling with the puzzle of who you are, or what you were. For him, everything is simple. He is simply the virgin lover returning to the woman he barely knows, the woman he must leave, the love that can never be. He is thinking that the last goodbye will be one of many thousands of goodbyes and kisses and embraces and, yes, promises and declarations of love. The
Shangri-La
cuts open the ocean as if the ship were a knife made of jade and the ocean the enemy. Orders go out from the bridge. The men do their tasks with a shrug, and the young Paul watches the rise and fall of his world and he thinks of you, Yukiko, somewhere out there thinking about him. In a moment of fantasy he thinks that if he called out to you, you would hear him. But what would he say?

I have been wondering about that for many, many, many years. I don’t have a ready answer. I probably never will have an answer. The old Paul cannot speak for the young Paul. So I will go on wondering and not knowing.

I have been asked, always by men friends and never by women friends, if I was really as ‘green’ as I have portrayed myself. Green, yes. I am not so jaded that I cannot happily admit that my green innocence was reality. It was the way things were in the late 1950s for many young men and women. It was in many ways, I believe, the last age of innocence. Sex was a mystery known to me only by rumour. Women feigned fainting when men touched their hands, or when they wrote sweet nothings in their high-school yearbooks that sound now as if they were written by children. Betty Friedan’s
The Feminine Mystique
had not yet been published; it did not appear until 1963. The Beatles did not record their first hit – ‘Love Me Do’ – until 1962, the year I got out of the navy, the year young women and men went collectively and joyfully insane.

In 1962, one night in a bar in Tokyo, I had a conversation with a young businessman named Nishida. I don’t recall being astonished when he told me he had trained in 1945 at the age of nineteen to be a ‘divine wind’ pilot – a kamikaze. The war had ended before he flew his mission. It did not strike me as odd when he described his teenage self as ‘sweet and innocent’. He talked about the farewell letter he had written to his parents. I took some notes when he was talking: ‘I told them I would always remember their shining love for me. I understood that their love would vanish when I vanished. I told them I would regret not having their love but I had to do my duty. I told them to please give my thanks to everyone who had given me friendship. I told my sisters to take care of my parents and to
always be worthy of being a Japanese woman. In that way, I said goodbye.’ He looked at me as if a chasm stretched between us that would not allow me to understand. Yes, I would have written that kind of letter, I told him. We drank sake. He filled my cup. I filled his cup. That was the custom.

The other day I came across an item at that great storehouse of video nostalgia, YouTube. It is a recording of ‘Barbara’, a poem written by the French writer Jacques Prévert and adapted and sung by a very young Yves Montand, who was not much older than I was in 1959. In the song, Montand cherishes a memory of a woman he knew briefly long ago, a memory of just a look, just a smile, a single embrace that can never be forgotten. This poem was translated by the American beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who is now ninety-five years old.

This afternoon, Yuki, the old Paul was watching for the eighth time the Italian film, from 2013,
La Grande Bellezza
[
The Great Beauty
], in which a sixty-five-year-old journalist whose past is riddled with rich experiences begins confronting the unpleasant truth that everything must change. The only woman he ever loved left him long ago without an explanation. Does this ring true? The journalist is a celebrated chronicler of
bon vivant
culture and excess. He has been to one too many parties. He has been celebrating his sixty-fifth birthday with characteristic decadence. He suddenly discovers that the woman has died. Her tearful and grieving husband, who he has not met before, comes to tell him that he has just read her private journals. She had written, the husband says, that the journalist – the seventeen-year-old boy she knew when she was nineteen, and who she never kissed – was the only man she ever loved. He becomes more aware than ever that beauty exists as he wanders through the film. All around him are friends and acquaintances whose lives are in disarray, whose loves and their urge to live are coming to an end. He thinks back to when he was seventeen and innocent, and his world is knocked off its axis. My sister Mary, quoting Oscar Wilde, told me recently that my life – my wanderings – has been ‘crowded with incident’. She is correct. My life has not been a tranquil river flowing to the sea. It has been a cataract. There have been whirlpools and waterfalls. As the film images flickered and I knew the narrative was taking turns that even on the first viewing were strangely familiar, I started to become despondent. I was on the verge of saying, ‘That man is me.’

But then there was proof that the Great God of Surprises has not forgotten me. This is the same God who, just like that, created the universe, I suppose, and then left everything else up to us.

Ring
.
Ring
. The phone was ringing. ‘Hello?’

A laugh. A young woman’s voice, its accent from somewhere in Asia but also somewhere in Europe: ‘Do you know who this is, Paul?’

‘Ummm. No. I’m sorry. No.’

Another laugh. ‘It’s Flor.’

‘What? Flor! You are calling me from Paris?’ I imagined Flor – who is from the Philippines and is studying at a French university and is always asking funny questions about French men and whether they can be trusted – eating a doughnut and drinking coffee in front of the Paris branch of Tiffany & Co. Flor’s command of spoken English and French has become exceptionally good in the four years since I have known her. She has a French Riviera sophistication to her now.

‘Do you know Audrey Hepburn?’ I asked.

‘Who? You know, I may be too young to know who Audrey Hepburn is.’

‘Flor. Try to see
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. She was living the life you are living right now, but that film was made in the early 1960s.’

‘Oh,’ Flor said. ‘When you were young.’ That gave me something to think about.

Yes, the Great God of Surprises has been busy, Yuki. I became more aware, as I was writing this book, that my knowledge of spoken Japanese and of Japan itself had become embarrassingly dated. I would be a Rip Van Winkle if I went back to Tokyo, I realized. Curious about what I would find, I had turned up at the 2013 Matsuri, a festival held annually in Phoenix that is America’s second largest celebration of Japanese food, drink, music, dance, and various arcane ceremonies. The experience was both familiar and – because of the enthusiastic presence of hundreds of American teens wearing the weird garb of Japanese
anime
(comic book) characters – unfamiliar to me. But while I was there, I was persuaded by one of its members to join the Japanese Culture Club of Arizona. It is a small organization that, I soon discovered, is dominated by women devoted to
chanoyu
, the severely formal Japanese tea ceremony, and to
ikebana
, the equally severe art of flower arranging. The club is led by Maejima Harumi, a woman in her fifties, who was dressed in a sleek kimono the colour of mulberry leaves with hints of violet when I met her. For me, struggling with images from circa 1959 of a Japan that I know has undergone several transformations, many of which I have been told have obliterated the past, this was reassuring affirmation that in the new Japan not all is forgotten.

Somehow the unlikely subject of Alfa Romeos came up.

‘Oh, yes,’ the serene Maejima-san said. ‘The Alfa Romeo. My favourite car.’ She paused. ‘Do you have a Spider?’

Surprised, I nodded in the affirmative.

‘I had a Giulietta,’ she said, referring to an older vintage of my car. ‘I used to race at Lime Rock [Connecticut].’

Bang
. Just like that, she was in the lead. My car, a two-seater like her Giulietta, is a gentleman’s cruiser, not a racing car. She had driven her Alfa in competition at the famed racetrack frequented by such daredevils as actor Paul Newman and professional racers Mario Andretti, Stirling Moss, and Dan Gurney. Maejima-san was not even born when my summer with Yukiko occurred. Here I was, in the quaint Souvia Tea shop in Phoenix, awed by a Japanese woman, again. Did this mean, I wondered, that despite rapid change, things are still very much the way they were: complete with poised, articulate, opinionated, reserved, demanding women actively living links to a culture and identity more than a thousand years old? I am sure you would have an opinion, Yuki.

Would I care to be the club’s treasurer, Maejima-san asked?

I balked.

‘How about advisor to the club?’

I agreed.

She poured tea and not just any tea: a seasonal black tea to commemorate spring, with a dried pink cherry blossom peeking out of the tea leaves like pursed lips ready for kissing.

21

Nocturnes

The hand-drawn sign outside the Mozart coffee shop read: ‘Jour De Fête Debussy! Vive L’Amour! Enjoy Your Happiness!’ I could recognize the hand of Mr Ito in this. He always had a surplus of smiles. I was a juvenile, still stuck with sneers.

As I approached the café, inhaling the delicious odour of espresso that filled the alley from sunrise to sunset, I could see the usual gathering of uniformed schoolgirls, clustered around the entrance, waiting for something exciting to happen. I was wearing the civilian clothes I had stashed at a locker club before the
Shangri-La
left for Hong Kong: light-brown three-button sports coat, dark-brown narrow necktie with discreet gold Deco zigzags, black pants with cuffs tight round the ankles, white socks, and black loafers. I had a couple of paperback books of poetry tucked under my arm. A bent cigarette dangled from my mouth. I had that look of rebellion on my face that you, Yuki, liked. I was feeling very Belmondo. I was feeling French.

The schoolgirls parted to let me pass. They were definitely
excited. A couple of them attempted to speak French to me, although I am not sure what a young Frenchman would be doing in shabby Yokosuka in an alley wet with the customary afternoon rain, even if he was lured there by the espresso sacrament. ‘
Bonjour, monsieur
,’ one of the girls managed to say. ‘
Comment ça va?
’ When I nodded, like a lout, as if I knew her but I had discarded her, she collapsed in a fit of red-faced giggles into the arms of friends staggering with the joy of unabashed embarrassment.

Earlier that afternoon I had stopped by the White Rose, but you were not there.
Mamasan
was not there. Reiko was not there. The remainder of the women who worked there were fluttering and twittering around the premises as only Japanese women can do, as if they were caged canaries.

Honcho was full of sailors from the
Shangri-La
headed to bars where they knew friendly faces. They acted as if they were children tasting their first chocolate milkshakes. Many bar hostesses stood in front of the places where they worked, showing off their cocktail dresses and newly permed hairdos and occasionally calling out names – ‘Bobby!’ ‘Johnnie!’ ‘Terry!’ – when they recognized favourite swabbies.

Everyone knew that this was the Shitty Shang’s last visit to Yokosuka. There was infection in the air. There was a fever, in fact, and everyone looked as if their body temperature had been elevated by at least two degrees. I knew that many members of the crew had unfinished business: some were ready to propose, some were determined to get drunker than they had ever been before, and some would be happy just to gather with their friends in a booth in the corner of a darkened bar so they could hold hands and maybe smooch a little with girls who they thought were their own.

I am sure at least one among them planned to make the one-hour train ride to Tokyo to propose marriage – thanks to the suggestion made by Commander Davy Crockett – to the most beautiful virgin woman in the world, Miss Kojima Akiko. Both Jim and Red were certain Miss Universe was a virgin, and so were Oscar and Gunther. Gunther had recovered now and was back to his old habit of looking over his shoulder. Oscar, a photo of Miss Kojima in his hand, had said to me before I went ashore, ‘Paul. You are a virgin. Look at her. You know. You can tell, right?’

We were all so young, thank God.

I had thought about Miss Universe as I picked my way through the streets and alleys to the Mozart. Her face was on the covers of many magazines in the newsstands. A few streets removed from Honcho I noticed that a couple of men wearing the white headbands of political protest, crouched on top of a sound truck festooned with what appeared to be anti-American slogans, were looking at a large foldout photograph of Kojima Akiko wearing a conservative one-piece bathing suit. One of the men gave me a comradely wave, and the other one handed me an English-language pamphlet from Nikkyoso – the Japan Teacher’s Union – which denounced the 1951 US–Japan security treaty. That agreement allows American forces to retain bases, such as the naval facilities at Yokosuka, seemingly into perpetuity. I waved back, and continued down the street remembering the advice from on high, given to everyone, to stay out of politics, and the remark made by Chaplain Peeples that it was not just Japanese teachers who were Communist.